Daniel Defoe

(Original surname Foe, Defoe altered it in 1703)

Born: 1660

Died: April 24, 1731

English novelist, pamphleteer,
and journalist, author of ROBINSON CRUSOE (1719), a story of a man
shipwrecked alone on an island. Along with Samuel Richardson, Defoe is
considered the founder of the English novel. Before his time stories
were usually written as long poems or dramas. He produced some 200 works
of nonfiction prose in addition to close 2 000 short essays in
periodical publications, several of which he also edited.

"One day, about noon, going towards my boat,
I was
exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the
shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand." (from Robinson Crusoe)

Daniel Defoe was born as the son of Alice and James Foe. His father
was a City tradesman and member of the Butchers’ Company. James Foe's
stubborn puritanism - the The Foes were Dissenters, Protestants who did
not belong to the Anglican Church - come occasionally comes through
Defoe's writing. He studied at Charles Morton's Academy, London.
Although his Nonconformist father intended him for the ministry, Defoe
plunged into politics and trade, travelling extensively in Europe.
Throughout his life, Defoe also wrote about mercantile projects, but his
business ventures failed and left him with large debts, amounting over
seventeen thousand pounds. This burden shadowed the remainder of his
life, which he once summoned:

"In the School of Affliction I have learnt more Philosophy than at the Academy,
and more Divinity than from the Pulpit: In Prison I have learnt to know
that Liberty does not consist in open Doors, and the free Egress and
Regress of Locomotion. I have seen the rough side of the World as well
as the smooth, and have in less than half a Year tasted the difference
between the Closet of a King, and the Dungeon of Newgate."

In the early 1680s Defoe was a commission merchant in Cornhill but
went bankrupt in 1691. In 1684 he married Mary Tuffley; they had two
sons and five daughters. Defoe was involved in Monmouth rebellion in
1685 against James II. While hiding as a fugitive in a churchyard after
the rebellion was put down, he noticed the name Robinson Crusoe carved
on a stone, and later gave it to his famous hero. Defoe became a
supporter of William, joining his army in 1688, and gaining a mercenary
reputation because change of allegiance. From 1695 to 1699 he was an
accountant to the commissioners of the glass duty and then associated
with a brick and tile works in Tilbury. The business failed in 1703.

In 1702 Defoe wrote his famous pamphlet THE SHORTEST-WAY WITH THE
DISSENTERS. Himself a Dissenter he mimicked the bloodthirsty rhetoric of
High Anglican Tories and pretended to argue for the extermination of all
Dissenters. Nobody was amused, Defoe was arrested in May 1703, but
released in return for services as a pamphleteer and intelligence agent
to Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford, and the Tories. While in prison
Defoe wrote a mock ode, HYMN TO THE PILLORY (1703). The poem was sold in
the streets, the audience drank to his health while he stood in the
pillory and read aloud his verses.

"Actions receive their tincture from the times,
And as they change are virtues made of crimes."
(from 'A Hymn to the Pillory')

When the Tories fell from power, Defoe continued to carry out
intelligence work for the Whig government. In his own days Defoe was
regarded as an unscrupulous, diabolical journalist. Defoe used a number
of pen names, including Eye Witness, T.Taylor, and Andrew Morton,
Merchant. His most unusual pen name was 'Heliostrapolis, secretary to
the Emperor of the Moon,' used on his political satire The
Consolidator, or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in
the Moon (1705). His political writings were widely read and made
him powerful enemies. His most remarkable achievement during Queen
Anne's reign was the periodical A Review of the Affairs of France,
and of All Europe (1704-1713). It was published weekly, later three
times a week and resembled a modern newspapers. From 1716 to 1720 Defoe
edited Mercurius Politicus, then the Manufacturer (1720),
and the Director (1720-21). He was contributor from 1715 to
periodicals published by Nathaniel Mist.

Defoe was one of the first to write stories about believable
characters in realistic situations using simple prose. He achieved
literary immortality when in April 1719 he published Robinson Crusoe,
which was based partly on the memoirs of voyagers and castaways, such as
Alexander Selkirk, who spent on his island four years and four months.
The first edition was printed in London by a publisher of a popular
books, W. Taylor. No author's name was given.

William Selkirk was the son of a Scottish tanner, who became the
master of the Cinque Ports Galley, a privateering ship. Selkirk went
to sea in 1704 under William Dampier and was put ashore at his own
request, or according to some sources as a punishment of
insubordination, on the island of Juan Fernandez in the Pacific,
hundreds of miles off the coast of Chile. The island was
uninhabited, and he survived there until his rescue in 1709 by
Captain Woodes Rogers. Selkirk claimed that he had become a "better
Christian" and it was a positive experience. As a journalist Defoe
must have heard his story and possibly interviewed him. Selkirk
never did go back to the Pacific island, as Defoe had Crusoe do in
two sequels. Selkirk became known as a eccentric. It is said the
taught alley cats how to do strange dances. - Robinson Crusoe is a
mariner - actually an arrogant slave trader - who runs away to the
sea at the age of 19 despite parental warnings. He suffers a number
of misfortunes at the hands of Barbary pirates and the elements.
Finally Crusoe is shipwrecked off South America. With salvaging
needful things from the ship, including the Bible, Crusoe manages to
survive in the island. "The Country appear'd so fresh," he writes in
his journal, "so green, so flourishing, every thing being in a
constant Verdure, or Flourish of Spring, that it looked like a
planted garden." He stays in the island 28 years, two months and
nineteen days. - Aided with his enterprising behavior, Crusoe adapts
into his alien environment. After several lone years he sees a
strange footprint in the sand. Savages arrive for a cannibal feast.
One of their prisoners manages to escape. Crusoe meets later the
frightened native and christens him Man Friday and teaches him
English. Later an English ship arrives. Crusoe rescues the captain
and crew from the hands of mutineers and returns to England.
Robinson marries and promises before end of the novel to describe
his adventures in Africa and China. - Sequels to the story, THE
FARTHER ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE (1719), in which Crusoe
revisits the island and loses Friday in an attack by savages, and
THE SERIOUS REFLECTIONS... OF ROBINSON CRUSOE (1729), did not gain
wide recognition. - In Luis Bunuel's film version from 1952 the
director sees Crusoe as a tortured soul, "haunted by the
ghost of his overbearing father (the hallucinatory sequences are
pure Bunuel), anguished at the failure of his religion to console
him (his despair is mocked when his recitation out loud of the 23rd
Psalm returns in a hollow echo), and frustrated in his sexual
repressions (cleverly conveyed by a scene where his drying garments
are blown by the wind into a suggestive female form." (from
Novels into Film by John C. Tibbets and James M. Welsh, 1999)

At first Defoe had troubles in finding a publisher for the book and
eventually received £10 for the manuscript. Employing a first-person
narrator and apparently genuine journal entries, Defoe created a
realistic frame for the novel, which distinguished it from its
predecessors. The account of a shipwrecked sailor was a comment both on
the human need for society and the equally powerful impulse for
solitude. But it also offered a dream of building a private kingdom, a
self-made Utopia, and being completely self-sufficient. By giving a
vivid reality to a theme with large mythic implications, the story have
since fascinated generations of readers as well as authors like Joachim
Heinrich Campen,
Jules
Verne, R.L.
Stevenson, Johann Wyss (Der schweizerische Robinson),
Michael Tournier (Vendredi
ou les limbes du Pacifique), J.M. Coetzee (Foe), and other
creators of Robinsonade stories.

During the remaining years, Defoe concentrated on books rather than
pamphlets. At the age of 62 he published MOLL FLANDERS, A JOURNAL OF THE
PLAGUE YEAR and COLONEL JACK. His last great work of fiction, ROXANA,
appeared in 1724. Defoe's choice of a female protagonist in Moll
Flanders reflected his interest in the female experience. Moll is
born in Newgate, where her mother is under sentence of death for theft.
Her sentence is commuted to transportation to Virginia. The abandoned
child is educated by a gentlewoman. Moll suffers romantic
disillusionment, when she is ruined at the hands of a cynical male
seducer. She becomes a whore and a thief, but finally she gains the
status of a gentlewoman through the spoils of a successful colonial
plantation.

Wherever God erects a house of prayer,
The Devil always builds a chapel there;
And 'twill be found, upon examination,
The latter has the largest congregation.(from The True-Born Englishman, 1701)

After being close to the Whigs, Defoe moved back to the Tories. In
the 1720s Defoe had ceased to be politically controversial in his
writings, and he produced several historical works, a guide book A TOUR
THROUGH THE WHOLE ISLAND OF GREAT BRITAIN (1724-27, 3 vols.), THE GREAT
LAW OF SUBORDINATION CONSIDERED (1724), an examination of the treatment
of servants, and THE COMPLETE ENGLISH TRADESMAN (1726). Defoe's father
had stayed with his older brother Henry in London during the Plague Year
of 1665, and their experiences possibly provided material for A JOURNAL
OF THE PLAGUE YEAR (1722). Defoe himself was about five years old at the
time. The narrator has the same initials, H.F., than Henry Foe. For his
account, Defoe also used printed records. Phenomenally industrious,
Defoe produced in his last years also works involving the supernatural,
THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE DEVIL (1726) and AN ESSAY ON THE HISTORY
AND REALITY OF APPARITIONS (1727). He died on 26 April, 1731, at his
lodgings in Ropemaker's Alley, Moorfields. One of the most complete
bibliographies of Defoe's works lists almost 400 titles, ranging from
pamphlets to books on the occult and novels.

For further reading:

Selkirk's Island: The True and Strange Adventures of the Real
Robinson Crusoe by Diana Souhami (2002)

Daniel Defoe-Master
of Fictions: His Life and Ideas by Maximillian E. Novak (2001)

Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures by
Richard West (1998)